4021.14.02
Captain Howard found Helena in the engineering crew’s central office. Her desk half-covered in empty bowls and plates gave the impression the chief engineer had just been sitting around, chowing down all this time, but the captain took the messy desk to be a sign of a busy crewmember.
In reality Helena had been working constantly the past couple days, but that didn’t mean she hadn’t been eating. There was a direct correlation between how busy she had been and how much she had been eating, and ‘near endlessly’ was the best way to sum up the past week.
After the diplomatic summit on Abraiq was concluded the Bos lucked out with the ambassador getting a lift back to his homeworld with a different ship, which meant Captain Howard could keep the ship orbiting the blue-purple world while Helena and her crew kept playing whack-a-mole with Engine 3’s problems. But then a few days later the Bos was called in to join an honor guard for a recently deceased admiral and that had been a nerve-wracking three days as to get to the site of the memorial they had to work the other two engines more than usual, while also working doubletime to keep Engine 3 running just enough to keep the ship on its proper course.
Fortunately the memorial itself, and the subsequent ferrying of the admiral’s body to the limits of his home star system, was a deliberately slow affair, befitting the solemnness of the occasion. But once the service was done and the Bos freed of obligations again the captain started to really come down on Helena. They wouldn’t always get leisurely escort missions like they had been lately, the ship had to be brought back to full operating standards immediately.
Now, several days later, there was no progress. The list of problems with Engine 3 shrank, then it grew again, then it shrank. Helena had stopped looking at good days as a sign that things were actually going to improve. Until she had a completely cleared board, she couldn’t relax.
Thus she had spent weeks now in a constant state of agitation, which meant weeks of constantly grazing or outright gobbling whatever the food processors would give her. And it was showing on the chief engineer’s body. The formerly thin Marrow had chunked up considerably, gaining at least a quarter of her initial weight, more likely a third. It was hard to tell when her legs were packed with muscle to begin with; that made her look deceptively lighter than she actually was.
Whatever her actual weight, Helena’s hips and butt were pressing the armrests of her chair, and Captain Howard wasn’t positive but the engineer looked like she was sitting higher than before. Plus her belly had filled out considerably, making her look outright pregnant, full term.
The rest of her was only marginally thicker, and that was only if you looked for it. But it was hard to miss how tight her uniform had become; Helena had plenty of time to hit the food processors, but she hadn’t bothered to have the matter compiler whip her up a bigger uniform.
Compared to her crew’s shoddy performance with Engine 3, that was an insignificant issue. As Helena looked up from her tablet Captain Howard put on her best poker face and said
“It’s been nearly a month since these problems with Engine 3 started-” She held up a hand as Helena opened her mouth, cutting the engineer off. Then she continued. “I understand this ship is a very complicated instrument requiring a lot of precision and fine-tuning…
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